Former Secretary of Defense Mattis details frustra
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I've got a lot of time for anyone who's willing to come in and serve the country," Mattis said. "I mean, it starts off from a position of respect."
"I had a policy disagreement. It was based on the military assessment that we owed him, I thought," he added. "And when we gave it to him I still respected our system of government, its civilian control [over] the decisions to go to war or not to go to war, to stay in a war or to pull out of a war. It's got to be that way."
In his new book, "Call Sign Chaos," Mattis says former President Barrack Obama made "catastrophic decisions". On Tuesday, Mattis noted his frustrations with the former commander-in-chief's handling of the Iraq War.
It is deeply frustrating when you see something like that play out the way we've been warned it would play out," he said. "And when we send the troops back in and look at the refugees, the millions of refugees, look at the hundreds of thousands of dead and wounded and there's a sense of sorrow and frustration."
MacCallum asked Mattis if he saw any parallels between the Obama administration's handling of Iraq and the Trump administration's current negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Mattis declined to speak specifically but warned about terrorism and the importance of allies.
"I would say that you and I are going to have to get used to terrorism as an ambient threat. It's going to be around us and we cannot just wish it away," Mattis said. "So in order to deal with this ambient threat, we're going to need all the allies we can get."